5 Ways Enterprise-Grade Support De-Risks Your PostgreSQL Database and Supercharges Innovation
Maximize PostgreSQL’s potential with EDB’s support, ensuring security, stability, and continuous innovation across your databases
There’s no doubt that Postgres is the most well-loved and advanced open source database on the market. Its agility, flexibility, scalability, security, and cost-efficiency make it the perfect choice for businesses that are invested in accelerating innovation as they build new applications and migrate legacy infrastructure.
But even the best databases experience issues, and if your organization is just running Community PostgreSQL without the assistance of enterprise support solutions, you’re taking large – and largely unnecessary – risks.
Think about airline mechanics, for instance. If it’s your car, you might be handy enough to make some of your own repairs. If you’re flying an airplane, you literally can’t afford for it to “go down.” You need mechanics who know your airplane inside and out and can ensure that nothing bad happens. Flying without this type of support in place is a huge risk, both in terms of “passenger safety” (your data) and “FAA regulations” (any relevant compliance for your solution).
This is where enterprise support comes in, and why it’s so critical. Not only does it de-risk your PostgreSQL database – along with every project and team that relies on it – but it gives you the stability to achieve more than you ever thought possible. To take full advantage of PostgreSQL, you need an environment that you can consistently rely on, supported by people who have the deepest possible understanding of your database and are constantly ready to help you both address challenges and amplify accomplishments.
Whether you’re looking to:
- Avoid crashes and bottlenecks for customer-facing features
- Build complex, sensitive, and mission-critical applications
- Plan to migrate from legacy databases like Oracle to the cloud
Enterprise-grade support is your database’s best ally.
This guide is designed to help you understand the full potential of PostgreSQL when backed by enterprise support. Here, we’ll discuss the five most impactful benefits enterprise-grade support provides for your PostgreSQL database and your business.
One of the key drivers for businesses adopting PostgreSQL is savings: the promise of an open source database that’s free of the stringent contracts imposed by commercial database providers, and one that’s, well, just plain free.
This is also why many who opt to use Community PostgreSQL hesitate to invest in enterprise support services. After all, the point of choosing Community PostgreSQL in the first place was to avoid having to spend unnecessarily.
However, the cost of an avoidable database crash can be much higher than that of the support that would have prevented it.
De-risking is Cost-saving
The best way to save money and drive revenue is to ensure your database’s constant operability, availability, and functionality. Every moment your database is down, you’re losing money. Your teams can’t access the applications they need to do their jobs, and your customers are wondering whether they’d be getting their needs met had they gone with one of your competitors instead.
Yes, outages are sometimes unavoidable, but that doesn’t mean every database outage is unpreventable or must last a second longer than necessary.
With enterprise Postgres support, you aren’t vulnerable to risks associated with rights management, SQL injection, database misconfiguration, human error, weak audit trails, lack of security, or compliance policy. You have 24/7 access to remote DBA services that can keep your database functional without spending extra time or resources.
Without this support, you might find your teams scrambling to find answers to a problem they don’t fully understand, fix a problem that’s a hassle to manage without the proper expertise, or deal with questions from other teams who suddenly can’t access their most mission-critical tools. And while this is happening, you’re losing revenue and customer trust.
That’s the cost-saving power of enterprise Postgres support: nipping preventable downtime in the bud and cutting down on the time and resources required to fix issues that might be unpreventable. That way, you don’t need to stress over teams being unable to accomplish business-critical processes or a dwindling customer base.
Making the Most of Your Team
But the savings enterprise Postgres support services offer don’t stop at crisis prevention.
Employing a full-time DBA team specializing in open source PostgreSQL is a costly investment – and one that businesses often forget to factor into the savings they anticipate from their free PostgreSQL database. If you don’t invest in DBAs capable of handling and managing an expansive PostgreSQL infrastructure, you risk jeopardizing your database and the essential assets it houses. However, if you do, you’ll be spending a great deal on your new team, which will be highly sought after by many other organizations.
With enterprise Postgres support, however, you can get a full, 24/7, on-demand team of PostgreSQL mechanics without the cost of having to hire them yourself. Whether your need is as simple as adding code and context-level expertise to your existing DBA teams or you’re still searching for your own PostgreSQL DBAs, EDB has the right fit for your journey. With enterprise support, your team investment can focus on a higher order of database development and application strategy. In a recent interview with one of our customers, EDB learned of the incredible savings the organization earned by not having to hire dedicated internal DBAs.
If you’re looking for more, the Remote DBA team at EDB has the deep knowledge you require to make the most of your PostgreSQL and is constantly monitoring and managing your databases.
Innovation Drives Earning
The financial benefits of enterprise Postgres support aren’t just about saving money. Effective support services can also boost revenue and customer retention.
Just as database downtime can lead to a loss in revenue, consistent uptime builds stronger relationships between a business and its customers, securing loyalty and trust in your solutions and services. Meanwhile, because your teams aren’t occupied with putting out fires or trying to troubleshoot, they can now focus on innovating your products, evolving your organization, and better responding to your customers’ needs.
Without effective database support, enterprises – even those using the most dynamic solutions available – can be stunted. All the time spent keeping their infrastructure operational leaves them, at best, treading water. But with support services, the energy once spent on ensuring a functional architecture is diverted to swimming ahead and pushing against the current.
Robust support resources are the best driver for growth, helping you innovate and transforming your business into a market leader.
With all its flexibility and agility, PostgreSQL is a database designed for innovation. It’s often said that people come to PostgreSQL for the savings and stay for the innovation. Without the restrictions that often come with popular proprietary databases like Oracle, the only limits on what you can achieve with PostgreSQL are your imagination and experience.
That is, if you have the support you need.
Real Innovation Requires a Solid Foundation
Every business deserves to take full advantage of everything PostgreSQL has to offer. However, businesses that rely solely on Community PostgreSQL don’t experience that opportunity often.
Why?
When your teams are occupied with chasing down answers to avoidable problems, your resources aren’t being spent on innovation. The more time an IT manager spends putting out small fires and the more energy a developer expends repeatedly testing and troubleshooting an application, the less they can dedicate to the transformative initiatives your business is excited about.
With enterprise support, it doesn’t have to be that way.
Access to robust remote DBAs means you’re not wasting resources addressing challenges that didn’t need to occur in the first place. Instead, the energy spent troubleshooting can go towards refining your applications, expanding your architecture, and innovating for your teams and customers.
But the benefits of enterprise support for innovation don’t stop at maintenance. With the help of deep PostgreSQL expertise, you don’t just get a foundation for innovation; you get a launching pad.
More than Just Troubleshooting
Again, the only limits to what you can achieve with PostgreSQL are imagination and experience. Enterprise support amplifies both.
Because powerful enterprise support puts you in direct contact with some of the biggest PostgreSQL innovators in the community, you can ask them for insights into what you want to achieve and how you can achieve it.
Never Worry About “Am I Doing It Right?” Again
This access is one of the most popular support features for businesses, especially for big projects. If you’re curious about the tools or applications best suited for a new transformation initiative, you can speak with someone who specializes in what you want to accomplish. Curious about how to amplify the speed or availability of your database? You can get advice from a PostgreSQL expert who eats, sleeps, and breathes database agility.
This is what we mean when we talk to organizations about the importance of deep expertise. That knowledge is invaluable when experiencing problems, but it’s equally vital when looking to take your innovative potential to the next level. We’ve witnessed the excitement among developers and IT managers when they learn they can do something with PostgreSQL they’d never thought of before or that the supposedly crazy project they want to tackle is more achievable than they’d considered.
With the backing of enterprise support, your business gains the confidence to innovate, the expertise to make the most of PostgreSQL, and the certainty that you can rely on your database for risk-free mission-critical initiatives.
Nowhere is the diverse and wide-ranging value of enterprise support clearer than in how PostgreSQL newcomers and veterans take equal advantage of these services.
Support for PostgreSQL Novices
You need to minimize your risk as much as possible whenever you’re adopting a new piece of technology – especially one as mission-critical as a central database. Many businesses might believe they can dive right into the deep end of PostgreSQL, but those who take this approach will quickly regret it.
Enterprise PostgreSQL support is the kickboard that keeps organizations new to the database project afloat, as they learn to navigate the nuances of their architecture. It ensures consistent, round-the-clock access to answers for whatever you want to build and cleans up the messes of deploying a new database.
From the moment you choose PostgreSQL as your new database, enterprise support is there for you. Whether you’re concerned about:
- How to get to PostgreSQL
- How to optimize your architecture
- How to take advantage of the cloud
- How to integrate essential tools
- How to future-proof your data and applications
The services of remote DBAs like EDB’s will have the information you need. With the backing of enterprise support, every PostgreSQL novice can become a PostgreSQL expert.
Support for PostgreSQL Experts
Enterprise support isn’t just for PostgreSQL newbies. Companies who reject these services because they’re confident they already know the ropes are losing out on as much, if not more, than novices who do the same.
The exciting thing about PostgreSQL is its constant evolution: the feeling that, with the right foundation, there’s always more to achieve and accomplish. With enterprise support, those already familiar with their database’s inner workings can innovate even further. They have access to the best DBA teams in case anything goes awry, and they have a direct line to PostgreSQL experts who are just as ambitious as they are.
Recently, EDB published a success story profiling Wharton Research Data Services (WRDS) out of UPenn. It was clear from the get-go that the WRDS team was more than familiar with PostgreSQL; however, enterprise support helped them achieve the supercharging of their database.
“Access to EDB’s technical bench has been invaluable,” the team told us. “If we ever get a really obscure error, we know that someone at EDB will know exactly how to fix it and will respond promptly. That expertise has helped us with a number of innovative projects.”
They explained how EDB support helped them build and maintain a complex mission-critical permissions script. If the script failed it would result in catastrophic issues for their clients and revenue. It would improve their ability to manage a massive customer base and gigantic data sets if it succeeded.
“This was a really important piece of code for our infrastructure, and rewriting it was a huge project,” WRDS relayed.
This is one example of why even the most experienced businesses can benefit from enterprise PostgreSQL support. No organization can know everything about the potential of their database – especially one that’s transforming as rapidly as PostgreSQL. With support services, you can tap into deeper knowledge.
With enterprise support, your novices will know what they don’t know and your PostgreSQL veterans will be in a better position to innovate. The entirety of your organization gets the benefit of a full circle of protection, essential to promoting stability and growth.
Upgrading PostgreSQL support and de-risking your database environment is a holistic advancement across teams. From the head of IT to DBAs and developers, enterprise-grade support can generate significant, immediate benefits. With 24/7 PostgreSQL expertise and remediation, IT managers are no longer scrambling for answers on bugs or updates. DBAs are empowered to identify and address issues more quickly, keeping the database performing at its highest level. With enterprise support, developers can focus on maintaining and debugging applications fast while discovering new ways to innovate in their code.
The difference between handling issues on your own versus tapping into an added layer of support is deep, extensible expertise. This gives your team a wider range of resources to tackle a wider range of challenges than if you were just relying on internal resources. With PostgreSQL experts on standby 24/7 for enterprise-grade troubleshooting and guidance, you can extend your capabilities with a circle of protection that surpasses what one person could do on their own.
Think about savings and risk. Why should you waste valuable time and resources looking for answers on a forum or documentation page about an outage when you can instantly lean on the best of the best? The more time you spend putting out fires, the less time you spend innovating.
With cost-effective value and expertise, you can focus on digital transformation and your support partner will take care of the rest. You get guidance from an extension of your in-house team on the right control measures to help protect your data, ensuring that you never fail – while avoiding administrative overhead. It is priceless to remain fearless 24/7.
Another central reason businesses choose PostgreSQL is the open source community supporting and evolving the database. At the heart of this community is the PostgreSQL Global Development Group (PGDG), led by the PostgreSQL Core Team. Made up of tens of thousands of contributors, the PostgreSQL Global Development Group does everything required to build and maintain PostgreSQL, providing the innovative spirit that has come to define the database.
The effectiveness of the PostgreSQL community has led some to refer to it as the ultimate democracy, making all its advances and insights available to every single PostgreSQL user. In short, if you have a question, there’s someone in the community who has the answer and has written about it so others can benefit.
For this reason, the idea of third-party support seems superfluous to some organizations that adopt PostgreSQL. If the community is already there, they figure they have support.
However, relying solely on the PostgreSQL community can present some challenges.
Finding the Answers to Database Problems is Time-Sensitive
The mass of knowledge contained and shared by the PostgreSQL community is unfathomably immense. It can also be difficult to navigate for those who might not have years of experience working with PostgreSQL and its adherents. With tens of thousands of experts all creating documentation, it can be harder to locate the answers to certain questions.
During the best of times, this can be somewhat frustrating, especially when attempting to figure out which forum to search for or what terminology to use to find the information you want. And when it’s a matter of database stability or availability, not knowing where to look can damage your infrastructure. It can cost you time and money, cause additional problems, and stymie teams across your entire organization. In moments like these, it won’t matter that the solution you’re looking for is out there; it’ll only matter that your database has been down for hours while trying to find it.
There’s a reason you don’t post on a WebMD message board when you need heart surgery. When the stakes are high, and the problem is immediate, you want to be working directly with the expert.
The PostgreSQL open source community is valuable, no doubt. But for your mission-critical database, you need fully accountable, always accessible, 24/7 365 support to ensure your business is constantly running at full capacity.
A Direct Line to the Experts
One of the biggest value-adds of enterprise support for PostgreSQL is the ability to get your answers – your database medicine – right away. Rather than putting the onus on your team to find the solutions to a problem, you have contact with specialists who will have the answers and can work with you to solve your issues in real time. You don’t have to risk taking too long to find what you need or accidentally deploying the wrong strategy and magnifying your issue.
And you’re getting these answers from the people who know PostgreSQL best.
Take EDB, for example. Over the 20 years we’ve worked with PostgreSQL, we’ve made it our mission to cultivate strong relationships with the community, bringing many Core Team members onto our team to help us build the best support infrastructure possible. As such, EDB’s enterprise support connects all our customers with a remote DBA team specialized and deeply immersed in the inner workings of Community PostgreSQL.
That’s one of the strengths of support that many overlook. Using enterprise support isn’t about choosing a third-party organization instead of the PostgreSQL community. In the best cases, it’s about working with an organization with deep ties to the community and the experience to help your company make the most of the resources and address avoidable issues before they destabilize your teams.
Enterprise support helps you get the answers you need right when you need them, so you can ensure an Always-On infrastructure while making the most of PostgreSQL.
Once you’ve decided to take advantage of enterprise PostgreSQL support’s myriad benefits, it’s important to find an organization to whom you’re comfortable entrusting your database.
As with selecting a database, this process should begin with outlining your business case, what you’re looking to achieve, what challenges you’ve faced, and where you see gaps within your database management strategy.
You want to find an enterprise support provider in line with all your needs: one who is truly as invested in your success as you are. Good criteria to inquire about are how they might help you implement new tools and applications and maximize your database’s availability, and how and when you can expect them to respond to your questions and concerns.
This last one is the most important. Just as you want an Always-On database, you deserve an Always-On support system. Enterprise support services shouldn’t just be there for you when things go wrong but whenever you need information, advice, or guidance.
Your PostgreSQL database deserves nothing less.
EDB Community 360
EDB Community 360 is enterprise-grade support designed for those invested in the full potential of open source PostgreSQL, regardless of their experience level.
As its name suggests, Community 360 is dedicated to a full-circle protection approach, addressing issues when they occur and, most importantly, helping you address them before they become problematic.
Always-On
EDB Community 360 is available 24/7, offering unlimited fixes and advice. Our goal is to support your database and your business at every turn, not to limit what you can achieve or leave your mission-critical assets at unnecessary risk.
Investment in open source
EDB firmly believes in the values of the open source PostgreSQL project, and Community 360 reflects that. Our enterprise support is available for users of both Community PostgreSQL and EDB Postgres and doesn’t require businesses to adopt any EDB solutions. Instead, it puts your freedom, flexibility, and control over your Postgres database first and foremost, whether you want to adopt a fully managed Postgres architecture or remain with the community version.
You upgrade on your own time and build to your standards. We’ll have your back no matter what.
Ease of adoption and use
No matter your role within your organization or team, you have full and easy access to all the resources of EDB Community 360. Developers, DBAs, IT managers, and more deserve consistent support, and EDB makes the process as simple as possible.
Respect of the community
EDB has long worked to cultivate a mutual relationship with the PostgreSQL community, contributing regularly to the project and ensuring we support its members as much as they have supported us. The result has been strong bonds with key figures in PostgreSQL, such as Bruce Momjian and the father of the database itself, Dr. Michael Stonebraker. Their insights have undergirded the development and growth of our Community 360 offering, ensuring an approach to PostgreSQL support in line with the people who know PostgreSQL best.
Your business depends on your database – every single aspect. Whether you’re in the cloud, on-premises, or using a hybrid model, the fact remains: there’s no piece of technology more important than your database. Why, then, would you want to put it at unnecessary risk?
With enterprise-grade PostgreSQL support, you can build the strongest protections 360 degrees around your database architecture, halting problems before they arise and getting immediate and easy access to the best possible expertise when problems do.
With the help of EDB Community 360, you can fortify your most vital technical asset and build on it like never before. When your PostgreSQL infrastructure is effectively supported, you can innovate constantly and fearlessly.
You deserve a database that allows you to transform and innovate your business past the limits of your competitors. So, you need support that will empower you every step of the way – support invested in PostgreSQL and you.
That’s EDB Community 360: where open source expertise meets enterprise vision.
PostgreSQL Enterprise Support: Content and Resources
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How did the State of Indiana’s Office of Technology Services improve its operations with EDB’s support?
How does the EDB support team take on a customer’s request for help? Check out this step-by-step case study.
What are the direct and indirect ways your organization can save resources with EDB’s remote DBAs?
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Enterprise-grade PostgreSQL support typically includes advanced features such as 24/7 technical assistance, high availability solutions, security enhancements, and performance tuning tailored to mission-critical applications.
Enterprise support offers robust security measures like advanced encryption methods (e.g., TDE and SSL/TLS), sophisticated authentication mechanisms (e.g., Kerberos, GSSAPI), and comprehensive auditing capabilities, which are unavailable in standard support.
Enterprise-grade support ensures high availability through automated failover strategies, replication solutions, and disaster recovery planning to minimize downtime and ensure business continuity.
Yes, enterprise support services often include assistance with compliance requirements, providing tools and practices to help organizations meet industry regulations such as GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI-DSS.
Enterprise support includes proactive performance monitoring, optimization strategies, and access to PostgreSQL experts who can diagnose and resolve performance issues effectively.
Many enterprise support services provide training sessions, documentation, and resources to help organizations effectively utilize PostgreSQL and enhance their team's technical skills.
Yes, enterprise-grade support services often offer customizable solutions tailored to meet specific business requirements, ensuring that organizations get the assistance they need for their unique environments.
Enterprise support typically includes managed services for updates and upgrades, ensuring that the PostgreSQL environment remains current and secure with minimal disruption to business operations.